User Experience Design Blog

Apr 8, 2009 - I encourage everyone in product development and service industries to watch the talk which Don Norman gave at UX Week last year (video below). I finally had a chance to watch the video that was released earlier this year, and heard many gems. It’s great to hear the father of User Experience design advocate for [...]

Apr 2, 2009 - Without user experience design to ground and inform it, trying to make sense of web analytics results in conjecture. On the other hand, user experience design without analytical testing to validate and fine-tune it can only be informed guesswork. Analytics data is useful when it is utilized to measure success of goals and to understand performance [...]

Mar 27, 2009 - Dave Zuverink, a Senior User Research Specialist on Adobe XD’s Mobile and Devices team, wrote a compelling article on the five dimensions of successful mobile application experiences. He lists: Core: the fundamentals which support the principle “form follows function” Social: taking advantage of the platform’s intrinsic communication focus Contextual: being aware of physical location (also, based on comments [...]

Mar 26, 2009 - Douglas Bowman, largely credited with building the visual design team at Google, left the company on Friday, March 20. On his last day he wrote his reasons for leaving on his blog, Stopdesign. In the post he states his frustration with data dictating design and leaving barely any room for creativity. Bowman writes: Yes, it’s true [...]

Mar 23, 2009 - BuisinessWeek has a great Q&A with Google’s Director of User Experience, Irene Au. In the article, Irene Au is asked about Google’s approach to design and brand coherence across different Google products. Not surprisingly, Google has a very scientific approach to experience design, heavily rooted in quantitative methods: [Engineers] and analysts pore over streams of data [...]

Mar 20, 2009 - Imagine you go to a store to buy some new jeans. As you are checking out, the cashier tells you that you must provide your name, email, and passcode to purchase the items you’ve selected. You’d probably exclaim some choice words and storm out of the store, vowing never to return. Well, many websites continue [...]

Mar 19, 2009 - The iPhone started a paradigm shift in mobile that led to a deluge of touch-screen devices, which differ only slightly in feature sets and overall experience. Marek Pawlowski of MEX writes a very detailed account how Palm went back to its ideological roots and to the blackboard to design a unique mobile device–the Pre. In [...]

Mar 19, 2009 - With all the talk of mobile phones and touch screen interfaces, it was nice to come across a fairly complete look at existing camera interfaces, which typically do not get much coverage. Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan, not only gives a great “visual tour” of the top players in camera devices: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Casio, Olympus [...]

Mar 18, 2009 - This post about FedEx courier devices was just brilliant. I’ve often wondered about these onerous-looking contraptions, and how much training they must require. The mere look of them is not very enticing. Joe Pemberton’s recount of this encounter is a story to which we can all relate. How many times have we heard people gripe [...]

Feb 25, 2009 - Two user experience researchers share on the Google Blog how their team conducted eye-tracking studies on the interface of Universal Search to gain insight into optimal information design. They write in their post: Our User Experience Research team has found that people evaluate the search results page so quickly that they make most of their decisions [...]